Haarlem, the capital of North Holland, is a bustling city much loved by its citizens and tourists. The Municipality of Haarlem strives to offer a high quality of life to residents and visitors through various digital services; however, their legacy IT infrastructure was holding them back from performing at full potential. To modernize their infrastructure and embark on their digital transformation, the Municipality of Haarlem partnered with IT consulting firm ITQ to implement VMware Cloud Foundation, Workspace ONE and NSX Data Center to level up their online presence.
Being slow was getting old
The Municipality of Haarlem was beleaguered by an ancient and slow IT infrastructure, which prevented them from producing helpful online services for citizens and tourists. Their legacy environment was bogged down with too many applications and their security needed a boost.
Additionally, the outdated infrastructure proved a challenge for remote work, which decreased employee productivity due to the difficulties of logging onto networks and slow system response times. This decrease in employee response times also impacted the level of service available to the municipality’s citizens, highlighting the urgent need for their IT systems to be modernized.
A foundation to rule the basics
VMware Cloud Foundation covers all the basics needed to have a successful digital transformation. Cloud Foundation modernized Haarlem’s data center with a hybrid cloud-ready underlay.
The Haarlem team also opted for VMware Workspace ONE for its speed, security and accessibility that boosts employee productivity. The tech team inventoried their application portfolio, waving goodbye to apps they no longer used and updating the essential apps. VMware NSX Data Center was the last step in shoring up their security, as the technology offers the end user applications in isolation.
“By opting for VMware Cloud Foundation and VMware Workspace ONE, we as a municipality have taken a five-year leap forward in our digitization.”
-Thomas van den Hoff, Project Leader / Scrum Master at the Municipality of Haarlem.
Sights set on the future
Switching to VMware Cloud Foundation accelerated the municipality’s digital transformation by a remarkable five years. The technology passed an early pressure test with flying colors. In the midst of a scheduled rollout, the company was forced to quickly switch to a fully remote workforce. To accommodate this, 1,500 workplaces were deployed at once. Within a week, 100% of municipality employees were safely working from home.
When Cloud Foundation and Workspace ONE were fully rolled out, Haarlem community workers were much more productive. They had secure access to relevant applications and could log in from anywhere. Ultimately, Haarlem citizens and visitors were able to benefit greatly from the new digital services the team was now technologically equipped to create.
Now that the Municipality of Haarlem has a strong grasp of the basics, they’re looking forward to implementing container technology with Tanzu Kubernetes Grid to allow software developers to work even faster.
Read the full success story and other Cloud Foundation customer stories here.
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